


cut your losses (and the weight of your sins)

by precipiceofyearning



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Alternate Canon, Angst, Broken Engagement, Character Death, Character Study, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Nightmares, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27431341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/precipiceofyearning/pseuds/precipiceofyearning
Summary: Condensation clings onto the bottom of Illumi’s glass. Gold eyes stare him down for an answer, and Illumi takes some time before returning the gaze. “You should be dead.”A study of Illumi and grief.
Relationships: Hisoka/Illumi Zoldyck
Comments: 5
Kudos: 84





	cut your losses (and the weight of your sins)

Illumi wakes up on the edge of his bed, half-naked and exposed. 

The frigid air feels warm on his skin and when he rolls over, the blankets are a shapeless, linen heap on the other side of the mattress. He had started off the night tucked in and centered, and yet he had awoken in this shape. 

A feeling of wrongness tugs at him, subtle but inexorable. As though he’d had something fundamental to his mornings taken from him. Illumi evades the question of _who_ or _what_ , if only because he’d already known the answer. Shutters close in his mind, clouding it for the moment, as he rolls back over onto his other side. It feels like he had just woken up from a dream. A long, long dream. He doesn’t spare a glance over his shoulder as he pulls his sweatpants over his hips, and begins his morning routine. First, the drag of a toothbrush on pearly whites. 

He spits the toothpaste out. The acidic, lingering taste of bile on his tongue laughs at him derisively, and when he looks up in the mirror, his own face stares back. Wide, deep-set eyes. Blacker than the inky pool of his hair. Empty, and hollow. Lips, that used to swell with touches of love. He looked normal from the shoulder up, no marks or bites or smiles, and Illumi wonders why the norm feels so out of place now.

When he goes back to drop his toothbrush back into its container, the pink one in a separate compartment stares back at him. He throws it into the trash without sparing a second glance. 

The door to his bathroom shuts behind Illumi after he finishes up. He ignores the indescribable weight on his chest. It intensifies with the passing time, the slow tick of his wall-mounted clock settling into his existence.

It has been less than twelve hours since he killed Hisoka Morow, at the latter’s own request, and Illumi finds himself struggling with what no amount of hindsight could have anticipated.

* * *

“Kil.” 

Killua’s eyes are wide and wary when Illumi appears before him at the entrance to the Zoldyck mansion. He’s not sure what Killua business is, but it’s always pleasant for Illumi to catch him during one of his rare visits back, even if the feeling isn’t necessarily reciprocated.

“What is it?” His brother asks cautiously, taut as a drawn bowstring. That won’t do. They hadn’t taught him to be so tense, not even when alert, and especially not in the presence of family. 

Really, his matters should stay his own. No need to drag anyone else into his business, in his head, his heart. They both have jobs to do.

“Nothing,” Illumi says eventually. He glances down at the boy, a numbing frost in his gaze.“Welcome home.”

“Is that all?” Killua tips his head and frowns, scrutinizing him. Illumi can see the cogs turn in his head. “What about Hisoka?”

And this is a topic Illumi particularly had not wanted to touch upon. 

“What about him,” he says; a statement, rather than a question posed.

“You killed him, didn’t you?” 

“Yes, it’s what he wants. Wanted, rather.”

“And what about you?” Killua presses, an urgency beneath his words and emotion displacing the freezing detachment he had previously shown. In spite of the firmness of his gaze, the weight on his heels looks to Illumi more like a fleeing animal. So this is who he had become, without the needle. Illumi isn’t quite sure if he likes this development. “What did you want?”

It’s rare for Killua to ask such a personal question, so he gives it a moment. “It doesn’t matter what I wanted. It was my job.”

Disgust fills the wide, blue eyes staring at him. Killua’s voice strains, tremoring with an emotion Illumi can’t put a name to. “He was your friend.”

It is these moments where the eldest realizes that Killua truly is the spitting image of Silva, Zeno, all the other heralded Zoldycks far preceding them. That Killua is everything Illumi couldn’t have been. It never bothers him much, that he had lost to Killua in terms of potential as an heir. Family is family, in the end, but this meant that they had grown up on different principles.

The smile on Illumi’s face emerges in cracks, slow like the rolling clouds overhead, and nothing like the sunlight that cleaves through them; an expression devoid of feeling. Killua jumps at the hand that gently rests atop the crown of his head, and looks like he’s about to run the other assassin through with his claws. 

Not unlike what Illumi had done to…

No matter.

“And this is why you don’t make friends, Kil,” Illumi says without malevolence, quiet as night. His tone falls; further, faster, until it is distant. “You’ll betray them eventually.”

He thinks to the moment he and Hisoka signed the contract, and the slack-jawed shock on his face when it had first been proposed. He thinks to their first mission, their first kiss, all the firsts that he can possibly muster from memory. And then there’s the question of how much he had forgotten, simply because it did not feel like it had mattered in the moment.

Illumi would have been lying if he were to say that he hadn’t anticipated this outcome from the moment they met, but for once, he’d hoped that his instincts were wrong. It would have been a waste, to lose someone so useful. That’s how he will rationalize it.  
  


“Or they’ll betray you.” 

Efficiency and usefulness. Those two alone could not justify the rancor in his voice. 

Betrayal—he realizes, as he says it—that’s what he had been feeling. There’s a sadder edge to Killua’s features now. Illumi can see it’s pity, but he won’t accept it even if it kills him.

* * *

The bar is empty when Illumi walks in. He stands in the shadowy doorway. It’s dark, except for a row of lights over the bar and near the windows. Hisoka’s standing behind the counter, with a shaker in his hand. Illumi feels strange seeing him in anything apart from his usual magician attire, but the black bow tie and striped shirt looks good on him. 

“Take a seat. I’ll make us some drinks.” Hisoka’s voice is velvety on Illumi’s ears. Calming, even. Illumi chooses the stool nearest to the window. To his left, the stars shine through the cloudless night. A cup of scotch taps on the counter in front of him as crisp ice cubes dance around in the glass. 

He raises an eyebrow, looking at Hisoka.

“The view up here is nice,” his lover says quaintly.

Hisoka shakes his own drink lightly, and lifts it to his lips. Condensation clings onto the bottom of Illumi’s glass. Gold eyes stare him down for an answer, and Illumi takes some time before returning the gaze. “You should be dead.”

Hisoka tilts his head curiously with airy laughter. A whimsical smile plays about his lips as he props his elbows forwards on the counter, a hair’s breadth of distance between their noses. “And why is that?”

This asshole. His hands ball up into fists at his side.

“Enlighten me, Illumi.” Hisoka’s face glimmers with delight, playful and cruel. He shuffles around a deck of cards between his hands, before drawing one from the top of the deck.

It’d been so long since he’d heard this, Hisoka’s call of his name. Illumi’s lips part to speak, but the syllables catch in his throat incoherently.

“You killed me,” he finishes for Illumi with a jarring bluntness. The point of the card draws down the middle of Illumi’s chest, slicing along his midriff like a scalpel. “Do you remember? The way my face looked when you did it?”

Illumi breathes. “Yes.” And it was the worst thing he’d ever seen.

Viscous, dark rot drips down from the orifices of Hisoka’s face, from his eyes, nose, and lips. He presses, unbridled giddiness and laughter in his cadence. “Did you enjoy it? Relish it?”

“No.” Illumi takes the card-wielding hand into his and it’s cold, so cold that he doesn’t know what to do other than scowl at the feeling. The smile fades off Hisoka’s face, and his beautiful ivory skin loses the last of its color. His teeth bare like the sneering maw of a starving beast, narrow irises an empty chasm threatening to devour Illumi. 

“Then, did it hurt?”

Hisoka’s voice shatters the silence, rattles the peace of Illumi’s mind like a violent storm. 

  
  


Illumi jolts awake as though each nerve of his body had been electrified. His tank top sticks to his back as he sits up, leans back against his bedrest. When he does, he can almost feel the shape of Hisoka press against him, wishes that he could feel the warmth of it, too. 

He can only laugh. The audacity of Hisoka, to have asked if killing him hurt with such ease and confidence, as if he had not only already known the answer, but loved it.

And the answer is and, always had been, yes. Illumi wishes he could tell him that, but it wouldn’t have mattered. That Hisoka had only been a figment of Illumi’s dream, a pitiful counterfeit that could only get under his skin half as well as the real thing. Even now, even if Illumi can still feel the card digging into the flesh of his midsection, and the sear of Hisoka’s blackened, rotted eyes on his skin, he knows it isn’t really him. 

Death is the perfect severance; it undoes the closest and most intimate of ties. Wholly appropriate for what they had.

Illumi gazes into the even emptier dark of his room and makes out the vague silhouettes that’d been there since childhood. The coffee table Hisoka had brought in from his apartment in the Heaven’s Arena; the scratched up antique wardrobe Kikyo had passed onto him; the weathered nightstand that had been in here since before his cradle. When Illumi sees them, the only thought he can muster is that _at least those will stick around_.

* * *

They do not honor Hisoka’s memory very enthusiastically. It’s not until Illumi tries to arrange something of a funeral that he realizes how little he truly knew of his lover. There’s no identifiable next of kin, or living relatives. Since there’s no other option, Illumi decides to bury the body alongside the other graves on the Zoldyck Estate.

There had been no funeral service. Though he was never short on enemies, Hisoka had few friends. In retrospect, Illumi thinks that’s a part of what had drawn them together—being nobody’s favorite, except for perhaps each other’s. No one grieves for Hisoka, really. Killua and Gon look disheartened for a few weeks, but the world continues to revolve, everyone embarks on the next chapter of their lives, and Hisoka Morow stays six feet under. 

* * *

Illlumi can be selfish. 

He doesn’t ponder this very much and just accepts it. The nature of an assassin is to be selfish, to earn their piece in blood-soaked coins atop a mound of nameless bodies, to topple heads so that he may keep his own on his shoulders. In the world he’d been born into, slowing down is lethal. Slow down for someone, and the shadow of society will leave you both in the dark with nothing left.

So the matter of settling down with Hisoka had never been so much as a vocalised proposition. And although it had been in the little things—the way their bodies pressed together in the afterglow of love, the linger of Hisoka’s scent on his sheets the morning after, the way Hisoka’s clothing slowly began collecting in the corner of Illumi’s closet—it had never been said.

Now it never will be.

And maybe, Illumi thinks one more lazy morning, it had meant to be as such. Because Hisoka had always meant to be with him, and he had always meant to be with Hisoka, and that is not a matter of them slowing down for the other, but simply keeping on together.

The stainless ring is cold on his finger when he slides it on. It’s a thin, golden band, nothing particularly lavish or expensive; pennies to the Zoldyck name, yet prized more than any of the black market’s most expensive wares, because with it, is the price of Hisoka’s head.

Illumi flexes his hand and tilts it at a few angles. He’d had it sized a few weeks before the contract, but it fits a little more loosely over his knuckle than it had back then, but it keeps on. 

And he, too, will keep on. Continue, even if the world turns slower without Hisoka in it, even if no amount of training in the book will tell him how to mend what’s broken. 

* * *

The sun is flush on his skin when he walks out of the Zoldyck estate. The band on Illumi’s ring finger glints blindingly when he holds it up to the sunlight, and he wonders why he had never once noticed its splendor beforehand.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> hi, thank you for reading! in hindsight, i'm not sure what inspired this fic, but i do remember the idea of illumi coping with emotions and grief consuming me until this fic happened. 
> 
> comments appreciated <3


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